Secondhand Lions (2003)

B
SDG

Like this spring’s engaging hit Holes, Secondhand Lions is a tale
of an awkward adolescent boy (Haley Joel Osment, A.I.) cruelly stranded in an inhospitable,
dusty, barren locale with intimidating authority figures, this
time a pair of crusty great-uncles (Robert Duvall and Michael
Caine) who, like Holes’s Mr. Sir, have an alarming
affinity for their firearms.

Artistic/Entertainment Value

Moral/Spiritual Value

Age Appropriateness

MPAA Rating

Caveat Spectator

The similarities don’t end there. Both films feature romance
and action in an exotic, almost epic back-story that may or may
not be entirely true, efforts to find a rumored hidden treasure,
and a question of larceny. Both films also boast juicy roles for
their formidable adult actors, though Lions is more
interested in young Walter’s uncles as characters than
Holes was in its rather cartoonish grownups, and Duvall
particularly brings more gusto to the role of Uncle Hub than even
Sigourney Weaver or Jon Voight in Holes.

In the end, though, Secondhand Lions is a pleasant and
entertaining film that’s neither as demanding nor as satisfying
as the superior Holes. The setup promises more early
conflict than the first act delivers, and the story-arc doesn’t
give the protagonist enough to do. Beyond that, the film gestures
at moral lessons it never quite fleshes out or illustrates, and
what ought to have been a key plot point is relegated to a
tacked-on coda, depriving it of the crucial significance it
should have had.

What carries the film in spite of these weaknesses, besides
the strong performances, are the appealing relationships that
develop between Walter and his uncles, tongue-in-cheek
serial-cliffhanger style flashbacks of derring-do in WWI-era
Europe and Africa, a couple of subversively funny subplots
involving money-hungry relatives and traveling salesmen, and some
good-hearted themes about responsibility, growing up, and old
age.

Wunderkind Haley Joel Osment continues his unbroken string of
solid performances, aging gracefully as an actor into
adolescence. Aside from a couple of moments in which he reaches
for childish mannerisms that aren’t there for him any more, he
delivers what the film needs, connecting credibly with his
veteran co-stars and glossing over some of the script’s thinner
patches with emotional conviction.

Writer-director Tim McCanlies, who previously wrote The Iron Giant, brings a similar
sense of nostalgia and sentiment to this live-action effort,
which is also about a boy growing up without a father figure who
finds a couple of unconventional role models. But where Iron
Giant’s Hogarth at least had a loving and devoted mother,
Walter’s mother (Kyra Sedgwick) is a flighty, unreliable bimbo
who fobs off her son for the summer on two uncles she barely
knows in order to pursue her social life. (This lack of a
positive background picture of family life is another point of
contrast with Holes.)

McCanlies also brings a kind of spiritual fuzziness that to a
lesser degree also affected The Iron Giant, with that
film’s notions of the "soul" as something inside "all good
things," and of all killing, even deer hunting, as "wrong."

There’s a key scene in Lions in which Walter tells
Uncle Hub that he doesn’t know what to believe any more and wants
the truth. Here is Uncle Hub’s regrettably quotable response: "If
you want to believe in something, then believe in it! Just
because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe
in it!" Uncle Hub then goes on to list some ideals he thinks are
worth believing in whether they’re true or not: that honor and
virtue, not money and power, are what really matter; that good
always triumphs over evil; that true love never dies.

Now, the fact is that there is truth to all these
propositions, depending on how they are understood. I can even
appreciate, in a sense, someone like Uncle Hub having the will to
recognize the value of these ideals despite not being in an
epistemological position to affirm their truth.

Nevertheless, expressed this way, this is bogus
sentimentality, not belief or faith — and this notion casts a
long shadow over the rest of the film. Even a revelation that
goes some way toward mitigating potentially problematic
implications in this regard feels less than entirely earned, like
more sentimentality on the part of the filmmaker. Like Hub,
McCanlies’s heart is in the right place, but his head could use a
little straightening out.

The net effect is that Secondhand Lions is a decent but
flawed film that had the potential to be a very good one.

On a side note, the film’s air of wistful nostalgia is
enhanced by the presence of cartoon art by Berke Breathed ("Bloom
County", "Outland"), the real hand behind the cartoons we see in
framing sequences in the studio of the adult Walter, who has
grown up to be a cartoonist. Along with Bill Watterson of
Calvin & Hobbes, Breathed is one of the most sharply
missed presences on the comic-strip page.

Addendum: Berke Breathed fans may be
interested to know that after posting this review I received the
following email from Mr. Breathed himself:

Thank you for the kind words in your review. You might not
have heard that I’m bringing Opus back to the Sunday comic pages
this Thanksgiving. I took your thoughtful lament to heart!